ENRON VALUES AT EPA

March 15, 2010

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), has introduced a bipartisan bill that would stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions by overturning its finding that global warming poses a clear and present danger to public health and welfare.

With the hacked/leaked e-mails of Climategate becoming public, we know that key scientists behind the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) covered up data that showed an unexpected decline in temperature and tried to suppress research that cast doubt on the notion that humans are responsible for catastrophic warming. Once the press in the United Kingdom started investigating the IPCC's predictions in detail, it found that one claim after another was based on faulty, non-peer-reviewed literature, say James Franko, a legislative assistant, and H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow, both with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

For instance:

The IPCC reported that Himalayan glaciers would melt in a few decades because of global climate change, but the best research indicated that was incorrect.

Other alarmist claims made by IPCC that have been shown to either lack supporting evidence or simply be wrong include the pace and impact of the loss of the Amazonian rain forests, the effects of climate upon rainfall and food production in Africa, and even something so straightforward as the proportion of Holland that sits below sea level.

Despite these flaws and others, the EPA relied on the IPCC to find that CO2 emissions pose a threat sufficient to take command of the U.S. economy. The EPA claims that its regulations won't increase costs or otherwise harm the economy. However, the regulations can't work if the costs of fossil fuels don't increase and force the public to shift to less reliable, more expensive alternative fuels, say Franco and Burnett.

Worst of all, the economic downturn brought on by the EPA's regulations will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions because fast-growing economic competitors such as China and India, not hampered by U.S. energy restrictions, will continue to generate huge growth in their emissions, say Franco and Burnett.